Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.

public defender lawyers who fought for workers rights and against items like company towns, abolitionists, etc. many good lawyers

finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days

you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks

tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess

The "good lawyer" is/was a major archetype in modern Western culture. See "The Devil and Daniel Webster", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Paths of Glory", just to name a few examples.

Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.